This is a critique of About Time (2013)
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13 September (revised, in case too hard on Curtis, 16 September [revisions in bold-face])
* NB Pretty spoilery *
This is a critique of About Time (2013)
It is inevitable that a film that features time travel will remind of other such films that do, such as Back to the Future (1985), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), or Dimensions (2011) (a truly independent production, set in Cambridge), and also invoke the likes of Lola Rennt (1998) (in English, Run Lola Run) and Sliding Doors (1998).
Those films have an internal logic, and they tend to try to keep to it. With About Time (2013), Richard Curtis is either cavalier with that logic, or just careless. A writer and director who introduces the sight-gag of a discovered off-stage band, which is not only worthy of Woody Allen, but definitely taken from one of his films (probably Bananas (1971)), shows that he does not hesitate to use something that does not chime with character or mood to get a laugh.
One can therefore use either theory to explain why the logic that Curtis chose to employ is handily overlooked (or ignored). Admittedly, some of the audience will not notice, but, with a very artificial piece of stage-machinery, one is running the risk of not undermining the others’ enjoyment, if it creaks so noisily.
Our protagonist Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) has a maybe older sister (he is 21, but her age seemed unclear) called Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson) whose life has become unnecessarily burdened, so he reckons on taking her back to when she picked up that burden. Apart from the fact that nothing has suggested that the male-only gift of doing so (by clenching one’s hands in the dark and thinking of that moment) allows passengers on one’s coat-tails, there is no obvious reason why Tim needs to take an older Kit Kat to that point : at his leisure, he could have gone back on his own, and contrived to distract her from the undesired encounter.
As it is, the first re-take is disastrous, and then the whole thing proves to have been so, because Tim’s baby has changed sex, the reason for which, relating to the chance nature of the moment of conception, Tim’s father then explains (though not, as becomes telling later, how he knows). ‘Remedying’ the change to the past that has already made is not explained, but the model of time travel that has been shown before (as when Tim regrets not giving a girl a New Year's kiss, or humorously wishes to rescue the opening night of Harry’s play) seems to have been that, when one revisited the past, what stemmed from it no longer exists, almost as if the new version of events has been recorded over it.
If that were not so, Tim would be able to pick and choose between different versions of events, and not have to shoo the extravagance of a band away when things have gone well. He would also not have to re-live the intervening time, which we see him do to seductive effect. Then again, when he goes back to just before midnight on New Year's Day, he simply returns from that moment and goes back to see his father...
So maybe Kit Kat and he would not both have had to re-live the time that had passed from New Year’s Eve, if one way of approaching this 'gift', then, may be to change a variable, and see what happens, another to do the same, but travel forward to the same point in the future in the expectation that nothing has changed.
That said, Tim tries changing several weeks' worth of dynamic between Kit Kat's friend Charlotte and him - the humour of the situation, i.e. that he still does not win her love, is allowed (and used) to gloss over the fact that going to Charlotte's room partway through her stay at his parents' house is hardly going to leave everything else unchanged.
For just seeing Tim not being natural because he knows things about Mary (Rachel McAdams), e.g. that she is a fan of Kate Moss (or even her name), that she knows that she has not told him proves how difficult that would be just for an hour or two. The time travel becomes a sort of alibi where, because one knows too much from what happened the time before, it tends to sound dodgy, like an excuse.
Yet the bigger sin against Curtis’ own logic is when Tim decides that he will have a different person do something important for him, and tries several friends in the role : for him to have done so, he would, again, have had to go right back to when he first asked the original person, and that, too, would impossibly unravel too much else, quite probably that exact baby’s conception (again).
That said, Curtis does not, after all, seem to mean us to take the time travel that literally, because the end of the film shifts into a more ‘preachy’ mode of using it reflectively, to go back over and cherish each moment / count one’s blessings, and seems to want to turn what went before more into a fable, if not downright disown it.
Indeed, Tim’s closing voice-over makes one think that a documentary about awareness has been tacked on, invoking the wisdom of some celebrated homily. (The quiet lyric of a Nick Cave song in the soundtrack even begins ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’.) It feels as though Curtis is using the medium of this film to try to pass on a weighty Socratic message about living a good life – and dying well – even if he may be out of his league…
With Richard Curtis, the similarities to his other films do not hide : Hugh Grant running across Notting Hill in that self-titled film is echoed here by Tim, there is a wedding and a funeral (of sorts), and we have the awkwardness of the main character, as if no Curtis leading man can be anything other than acutely and Britishly self-conscious. (The difference being that running a bookshop maybe requires less tact, discretion, charm than being a successful barrister.)
Without the self-consciousness, there would be little need for the family secret that Tim’s father (Bill Nighy) passes on to him - with it, blurting out to Mary’s parents about their sex-life would be so commonplace that Tim would ever and exhaustingly be clenching his fists to undo things. Again, to the extent that the film works through humour, the comedic effect is put before stable characters.
Thus, if one of his friends is to be believed, Tim is sexually experienced, but he behaves like a virgin, and, in the summer following his twenty-first, has a crush on Kit Kat’s friend Charlotte (Margot Robbie), calling her ‘my first love’. The friend may just be being embarrassing, but, when Tim is counting his blessings and how he has been served that day, the price of his sandwich order rises from around £4.40 (when he is in a rush) to some £6.20 (stopping to appreciate the woman’s smile), and there have been other reasons already to doubt this scripting.
However, unless you credit that counsel at the Criminal Bar are just like actors and can throw themselves into their brief (we also see Tim with modest quantities of paperwork, and never working into the night to master his brief), Tim has hardly the best foundation for good court advocacy, to the extent that it requires some thinking on one’s feet. (Quite apart from the fact that, at Tim’s age, he would at best be newly called to The Bar, if not in pupillage.)
Talking, for a moment, of Tim’s parents, one must feel sorry for the role that Lindsay Duncan is given of a tea-making, picnicking mother who is somewhat gauchely forthright, for, although Tim clearly takes much of his character from her, a highly urbane Nighy is given a much more fleshed-out part, and steals – or comes close to stealing – the important scenes between Gleeson and him.
The cast is good, and gives of its best, with McAdams, Gleeson, Robbie and Joshua McGuire (as Rory) standing out, but ‘the depth’ of the writing does let them down : Nighy is the only one who feels rounded, whereas Gleeson’s utterances too often make one just cringe, and enough others are stock (Curtis) characters.
Tim’s mother has been mentioned, but there is also the uncle (nicely played, though, by Richard Cordery), the playwright Harry (likewise Tom Hollander), the clumsy friend Jay (with no stereotypical suggestion, one can be sure, of inbreeding)… Tim goes back in time just to be with his father, who is reading Dickens, and Nighy reads a passage to Gleeson.
Maybe an attempt at Dickens with time travel is a bit, overall, what About Time feels like – no disrespect to the novelist !
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
